When and how is the Holy Spirit “Received”?
I was raised in the church from early childhood and have heard many sermons about what was admirable among the original Christians: how they walked in the power of the Holy Spirit, how they lived such sacrificial lives for one another, how they were so generous with one another, even to the point of having “all things in common.” Invariably, the great majority of those sermons would conclude with exhortations for us to follow in their footsteps – all of which is quite appropriate.
But in my own life, those exhortations lost their effect after the first half-dozen or so sermons. Exhortations by themselves do not tell you how to enter into what those first Christians were like. Just telling people what is true does not provide the way to make it become true in their lives. Perhaps the ultimate exhortation came from Jesus Himself: “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). By itself, that exhortation is actually crushing, if you really take it seriously. Clearly Jesus meant what He said and was not using some poetic “hyperbole” (which He never did!). But that exhortation, like all exhortations, by itself tells you what to do or experience, but not how to make it happen. Sermons and teachings regarding things like “walking in the Spirit” or “being like the first Christians” are also almost always exhortations that compare us against Jesus, His apostles, and very remarkable individuals (such as my wonderful Corrie ten Boom, for example).
But the New Testament Scriptures themselves provide much more than exhortations; they provide the actual and specific way for us to begin our equivalent journey. It is the way of the Biblical promise. Isaiah 62:6-7 teaches that way:
“6 I have set watchmen on your walls, O Jerusalem; They shall never hold their peace, day or night. You who make mention of the LORD, do not keep silent, 7 And give Him no rest till He establishes And till He makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth”
A number of Jesus’ parables teach that same thing:
‘And then He told them a parable, the point being that one needs to always pray and not lose heart, 2 saying: “There was a judge in a certain town who did not fear God nor regard man. 3 But there was a widow in that town, and she kept coming to him, saying, ‘Get justice for me from my adversary’. 4 And for a while he refused; but afterward he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God nor regard man, 5 yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will defend her, so that her endless coming doesn’t wear me out!’” 6 Then the Lord said: “Hear what the unjust judge said. 7 And will not God get justice for His elect who are crying out to Him day and night, indeed being patient with them?”’ (Luke 18:1-7).
“If you then, although you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him (Luke 11:13).
According to the way of promises, we are to first understand what God is specifically promising and then we are to “give Him no rest”: first become convinced that the promise applies to us and then persistently claim and request His promise until He grants what He has promised (and commanded). Such persistence does not imply that God needs to be somehow forced into conceding to our desire, but rather that we need to maintain that persistent focus so that we learn not only how to receive that particular promise, but that we also learn how to not “lose heart.” Does that not make sense to you?
The personal receiving of the Holy Spirit is also achieved through that way of promise, so I discovered. By 1972, after years of being swallowed up by unbelieving theology and backsliding against the way of Christ, the Lord had brought me to a painful degree of desperation: I knew I had become inwardly empty and far removed from Him. The godless form of Christianity that had been “educated” into me had turned that original simple surrender to Him into a sophisticated version of “always learning and never coming to the knowledge of the truth.” But our Holy One drew me back to my small hometown in California, and into a small congregation where the promises in the “charismatic movement” were being taught and experienced. Challenged by some of them, I began my own “way of promise,” doing a lot of homework and prayer until I was convinced that some version of Acts 2 had always been part of God’s definition of the gospel’s “good news,” that the Pentecostal promise was still for our day, and (finally) that I had the need, the right, and the duty to “give Him no rest” about it.
Being an already ordained priest, I will never forget the humbling He put me through during that period. I remember feeling like a supposedly “professional shoe repair man” who just discovered that he did not even know how to put a sole on a shoe! I who had written twenty-page papers about the Holy Spirit did not know whereof I wrote experientially!
After understanding the nature of God’s Pentecostal promise, I went to every prayer meeting I knew about and kept asking for the laying on of hands to receive the Holy Spirit: desperation trumped pride. During the three months of very intense “pursuit” of His promise He worked to get my focus more on Him than on that promise, but at a four-day retreat in December, He set it up for me to enter into that promise, and the gift of “tongues” also came a week later (which I had not been eager to pursue).
The important thing in all of my story is that I had to recognize that “filling,” “receiving” or “baptism” in the Spirit as an actual promise for me to pursue (as in Isaiah 62 above).
Most Protestant evangelical churches teach that when you “accept Christ” you have also “received” the Holy Spirit. Most sacramentally oriented churches teach that the Holy Spirit is received when you have hands laid upon you at the rite of Confirmation. In the Roman church that occurs at adolescence. In Eastern Orthodoxy it occurs at the same time as baptism (called “Chrismation”).
The trouble with these teachings is that according to apostolic authority when you receive the Holy Spirit you will always remember receiving the Holy Spirit. But when you teach that you have already received the Holy Spirit when you have “accepted Christ” or been baptized (as infant or adult), you functionally take away that Pentecostal event as a promise, a specific promise that you can and should pursue. In such churches the individual member is taught, and therefore naturally assumes, that since they have already “received” the Holy Spirit, then all they need now is to grow in holiness day by day.
The Book of Acts describes four occasions of receiving the Holy Spirit: Acts chapter 2 (the 120 at the day of Pentecost), chapter 8 (the newly baptized Samaritan disciples), chapter 10 (Cornelius and his “household”), and chapter 19 (the twelve non-baptized but true “disciples” of Jesus). And, very significantly, Peter explicitly said that what had happened to Cornelius’ household and the event of Acts chapter 2 were identical events, as being the time when they all had “received” the Holy Spirit (Acts 10:47). That is the very word he used: “received.”
And even more significant, even decisive, is what Paul asked of the twelve Ephesian “disciples” in Acts 19: “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” Think about it: if you always “receive” the Holy Spirit when you “believe” (as is so commonly taught), how on earth could Paul have ever even thought to ask that specific question to them (i.e., “Did you receive…”)? From such Biblical testimony, it is necessarily clear that when you “receive” the Holy Spirit it is an experiential event that you can remember. Furthermore, it is a distinct event that might occur distinct from the time of belief and baptism (e.g., the 120 of chapter 2 and the Samaritans of chapter 8), at the time of baptism (the Ephesians of chapter 19), or utterly sovereignly, apart from any external event (Cornelius’ household of chapter 10). And Paul also provided another clue in Galatians 3:2, “This only I want to learn from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?” Is it not obvious to you that in saying this He was asking them to remember the time and circumstances when they had “received” the Holy Spirit?
In the New Testament we are watching how God fulfilled His theology about “receiving” the Holy Spirit. And God’s version of that baptismal immersion in the Holy Spirit is remembered! And that remembered Pentecostal event is how you “receive” the Holy Spirit. Or do you perhaps think that Peter and Paul should have used a different word than “receive”? Yet that word “receive” is the very word Peter (like Paul) used for those who heard his first Pentecostal sermon:
“38 Then Peter said to them, ‘Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 For the promise is to you and to your children, and to all who are afar off, as many as the Lord our God will call.’”
That passage teaches you that what Peter and the 120 went through was what is promised to you also; you who are among those who are “afar off.”
Teaching that we should assume that we have already “received” the Holy Spirit when we first believed in Christ is not backed up by any Scriptural evidence and deprives people of the promise to pursue Him, by which they actually can receive Him. Never, ever forget: the audience of disciples being addressed in the epistles were all experienced “Pentecostals,” like those I described above. All the passages that say things like the following passage were given in a Pentecostal context: “And if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, then He who raised the Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of His Spirit who dwells in you.” Just because that, and other, passages use the word “you” does not automatically mean that it includes you and me, as I was raised to assume. Paul and all the other apostolic writers were talking to their audiences,, people that had received the anointed apostolic levels of “cut to the heart” versions of truth and depth, people who had already had their own Pentecostal experience. Passages like that one only apply to us if we are in the same condition that they were. And the vast majority of Christendom’s Christians are not in that experiential condition – normally through no fault of our own.
The receiving of the Holy Spirit is not only about praying in tongues, prophesying, healing of the sick, or casting out evil spirits (as very valuable and needed as they truly are). How do you think Paul imagined his “Spirit-received” readers were also going to experience the following: “That you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:19)? That is the goal that the Pentecostal Spirit has for you after you have received Him! And, if you have not yet received the Holy Spirit, how would you expect he might think you could be “strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man” (3:16)? Pentecost is God’s gospel promise for all who come to Him in the new covenant that His Son brought to earth. Paul’s exhortation to “be filled with the Spirit” was not a mere “exhortation;” We are also shown the promise and the procedures by which that can actually happen!
This experienced and remembered Pentecostal event is more than how you become a gifted Christian. It is how you become a “Christian,” as God defines “Christian.”
Are you now prepared to “give Him no rest”?
